


What Will Happen

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fantasizing, First Kiss, M/M, POV John Watson, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 17:24:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1949754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I made my choices, my decisions. As it turns out, I was wrong. Let me-- Let me rectify this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Will Happen

And we used to be steadfast and immutable with our eyes forever set on the unstable colours of a horizon that wasn’t ours. You took it upon yourself to beat an angry pulse on my ribcage from the inside out and I loved every second of it.

But now-- Well, I suppose the sky changed altogether, and the sunset of peach and golden threads sewn behind the clouds were torn apart by the introduction of our moon, burning and staining. Now all I can see is the residual charcoal and though I know beyond my eyes lies the blue of a perfect summer afternoon I can’t quite, I can’t quite can’t quite i can’t

My hands don’t touch it. It’s not here for us.

So perhaps that’s why - recently - I’ve been dreaming of girls with aged faces; dancing alone in a room full of non-people, dancing alone and filling the spaces between the air where she thinks they are standing with the music that her hair makes. Sometimes I don’t realise her greyed and haggard skin until she turns to face me because her skirts are like water and they move so fast it’s like she doesn’t have feet. Sometimes it’s as if I am dreaming with her, that I’m seeing all the men in suits and shined shoes and it’s only when I step back that I notice the wood she glides across is dulled and the walls are halfway to being not there at all.

I’ve been dreaming of old men who are really boys, sitting alone on their front door step, kicking angry patterns into the dust and wearing jackets that their mother made for them, breathing in the solitary air and fantasising about large cities and of being squashed by all sides by hurrying morning commuters and of fresh rainwater, glistening and slowly rolling off the arch of a neglected leaf.

Occasionally - when I walk into a room that you are occupying with your consciousness and you turn to face the window, you breathe on the glass of the mirror as if you can pretend my reflection isn’t there, your fingers twitch as if you’re restraining yourself from reaching out, you pick up your violin and hold it with the intention of stringing notes together but you don’t move - occasionally all I can hear is the sound of someone’s footsteps and the sound they make as the noises fall towards the perpetual downwards of things, forever plaguing vibrantly wallpapered hallways that I used to be able to navigate by touch alone.

You must understand (please, please understand) that I was in a brightly lit room and although the saturation of the light was faded to nearly nothing, I could pretend that just behind the overwhelming whiteness loomed your silhouette. I was drowning in a possibility of your breathing that I knew didn’t exist. So you must understand that when I found her _I had found her_ and she turned and muted all of the noises of colour until, at once, she turned off all the lights and I knew - starkly and harshly and somewhat brilliantly - I knew I had found the surface. I clung to her because she was the first thing my grasping fists found.

I can’t - I didn’t think I could - punish her for my own frailties and capricious failings (but now but now but now),,,,

This time. This time I’m going to walk into a room that is overflowing with you. It won’t be any different from when I did this yesterday, or the week before that. But this time you will notice me. You won’t cower behind your own breath and you won’t think - you will not think - that I would rather be in a room containing feeble wisps of the woman I thought I had married, you won’t think I am uninterested in you, that you’re my second choice.

Right now. I’m at your door now. This door used to be ours. When you open it you’ll say, “John,” and turn away, or perhaps you won’t say anything at all. And when you do, I’ll say, “I left her. She wasn’t-- I made a mistake.” Or I’ll say, “You don’t think it, you might never think it and that’s okay but I need to say this, just once--” and then I’ll say words that are only really words strung together to create something powerful. Or I’ll say absolutely nothing at all, stride into your living room and take your face between my palms, press my mouth against yours so hungrily and with so much regret that I never spoke to you like this, like how the words can’t. From a distance it will look like we are swaying minutely together in the dim light of the evening, but to us-- well, we’ll understand how it feels to be part of the ferociousness of wild animals or the crashing of the ocean somewhere where no man has ever seen.

I exhale. Inhale. Reach up my hand to knock.


End file.
